the sad red earth

The Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concludes today after eleven days.  Among the documents produced, according to Indian Country Today was a “groundbreaking report examining the roots of Christian domination over indigenous peoples and their lands”:

North American Representative to the Permanent Forum Tonya Gonnella Frichner, an attorney and founder of the American Indian Law Alliance, presented a preliminary study on the “Doctrine of Discovery” and its historical impacts on indigenous peoples, with a focus on how it became part of United States laws.

“The first thing indigenous peoples share is the experience of having been invaded by those who treated us without compassion because they considered us to be less than human,” said Frichner, a citizen of the Onondaga Nation serving her first term on the 16-member UNPFII.

“Dehumanization leads to the second thing indigenous peoples share in common: Being treated on the basis of the belief that those who invaded our territories have a right of lordship or dominance over our existence and, therefore, have the right to take, grant, and dispose of our lands, territories, and resources without our permission or consent.”

Frichner said human rights violations faced by indigenous peoples can all be traced to the Doctrine of Discovery and its interpretive framework which has been used for five centuries to take Native lands.

I wrote about the Doctrine of Discovery in The Legal Justification for the Native Conquest. A rough equivalent to the Dred Scott decision for African-Americans, the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh affirmed U.S. rights through inheritance of the Christian, European doctrine. Unlike Dred Scott, Johnson v. M’Intosh has never been nullified by the Court and is used to this day as legal foundation in Native American cases that come before the Court.

The Vatican’s Doctrine of Discovery was based on the premise that all non-Christian land belonged to no one because no Christians were living there and no Christian monarch or lord had yet claimed dominion. Once Christian monarchies like Spain or France claimed the right of dominion, that claim was transferred to political successors over centuries.

The Vatican observer to the Forum responded that

the papal bulls that paved the way for European expansion had been abrogated over centuries. He insisted the Church had upheld the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands, regardless of whether the inhabitants were Christian or not.

Yet as I discussed in “Aboriginal Sin,” (pdf) in Tikkun,

During his visit to Brazil of May, 2007, Pope Benedict outraged many South American indigenous groups by suggesting that the deliverance of Christian faith to the native populations of South America had been a benefit of the colonial era—a benefit, indeed, for which the indigenous peoples had been “silently longing” and that had “shaped their culture for 500 years.” Speaking defensively, and in denial of the historical record, he declared, “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”

The colonial conquest of the Americas is inseparable in its project from the Christian European mission to spread the faith.

Other, surprising news from the Forum came on the first day, when New Zealand, one of only four nations to vote against the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced that it was reversing it decision and supporting the Declaration. Australia, another negative vote, had previously announced its reversal. Canada has given signs of a reversal, though it hasn’t yet formally announced. If it does, that would leave the United States as the sole nation standing in opposition to the Declaration.

In the face of such isolation, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice to the U.N. “announced that the United States is undertaking a review of its opposition”:

During President Obama’s first year in office, tribal leaders encouraged the United States to re-examine its position on the Declaration – an important recommendation that directly complements our commitment to work together with the international community on the many challenges that indigenous peoples face. We will be conducting a formal review of the Declaration and the U.S. position on it.

There is no American history without Native American history. There can be no just and decent future for our nation that does not directly tackle the legacy of bitter discrimination and sorrow that the first Americans still live with. And America cannot be fully whole until its first inhabitants enjoy all the blessings of liberty, prosperity, and dignity. Let there be no doubt of our commitment. We stand ready to be judged by the results.

However,

Others were disappointed that the United States – a country that postures itself as a champion of democracy and human rights worldwide – did not support it outright.

“We’ve already been there. It seems extraordinary to review it again since it has already been debated and adopted by the international community,” said Debra Harry, Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism executive director. “We’d like to see the United States adopt it now, and then let’s talk about how to implement it domestically.”

The U.S. delegation offered that such significant acts require extensive review across federal agencies in preparation for implementation, all of which sounds on its face very reasonable when considering the nature of mammoth government bureaucracies, but consider, too, that bureaucratic sluggishness, to the point of disingenuousness is the history of U.S. government relations with Native America.

Consider that I wrote here in the middle of December last year about a negotiated settlement between the U.S. and plaintiff in the historic thirteen-year-old Individual Money Trust Fund suit. Consider that announced intent then was the Congress would ratify the settlement by the end of December 2009. Didn’t happen, as Indian Country Today reports:

The possibility of two substantial financial settlements involving Indian interests continues to hang in the balance, with several well-publicized deadlines having passed without federal action.

The separate and unique cases are known as Cobell v. Salazar and Keepseagle v. Vilsack. The former centers on claims by thousands of Indians that the federal government mismanaged billions of dollars in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Department of the Interior for Indian trustees since 1887. The latter involves thousands of tribal plaintiffs who contend that Department of Agriculture officials denied or delayed a number of farm and ranch loans and emergency assistance applications by Indians.

Cobell has been ongoing since 1996; Keepseagle since 1999. Many Indians who would have benefited from settlement in both cases have passed away, according to their lawyers and plaintiffs. Many who survive live in extreme poverty.

Three deadlines have expired for Congress to approve a settlement for Cobell, worked out between the Indian plaintiffs and the Obama administration in early December. The expired deadlines were in December, February, and now April.

Judge James Robertson, presiding over Cobell has announced that he will not sanction further extensions beyond the latest, to May 31. Should the Congress not act by then, the likelihood increases that Robertson will enact his own settlement terms, which had already promised to be far below the already meager dollar amount, given the many tens of billions of dollars sued for, offered by the Obama administration.

How might we expect Native America to respond to yet one more – to count would be a laughing matter – insincerity and indifference?

What should we think – really, what should we think – about this prospect, currently being urged by some in Native America, that John Ecohawk, long-time director of the Native American Rights Fund be considered to fill the pending Supreme Court vacancy?

Imagine the doctrines of discovery that would lead to. But who wants to read them?

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 10:23 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

Composition: Egzekutor

Tomasz Stanko – trumpet

Justyna Steczkowska – vocalise

Janusz Skowron – synthesizer

Slawomir Kurkiewicz – bass

Michal Miskiewicz – percussion

Zbigniew Brysiak – drums

Recorded:

in Warsaw, Poland 2001

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 7:52 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

So the other day I wrote a bit about the conformist emotions and manipulations often found in conservative-style patriotism. It isn’t enough to organize against government policies considered objectionable – the organization need be one of tea party patriots. Those against whom conservatives organize cannot simply be mistaken or wrongheaded – they must by styled treasonous or un-American. Yes, it is true that liberals will at times reach for those labels, but most of the time that is the reactive tendency I spoke of in that post, to seek to weaken, by adopting, the gestures of the other side. Historically, the making of the patriotic argument via the “un-American” and “treasonous” ad hominem is quintessential conservative politics.

As I suggested the other day, too, the dubious morality mixes with cheesy esthetics. Gretchen Carlson of Fox & Friends oozes it.

Observing that one fellow, Emil Di Motta, was wearing a flag motif tie, Gretch, ever a fan of the well dressed patriot, gushed that “I see the patriotism even goes to the ties.” You could feel the heat when she seductively smiled and said “I like that.”

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says of kitsch that it

causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Carlson’s “I like that” is the second tear. It is the self-congratulation that, when applied to patriotism – by Palin, Beck, and so many conservative leaders – makes patriotism, like the braggart hero, kitsch.

Much liberal discomfort with patriotic display – and awkwardness, in attempting to look away, without being perceived as having turned away – arises in response to patriotic kitsch.

But it isn’t only liberals who are reactive. So, too, are conservatives. To what?

One of the rankest and stupidest pieces of writing produced this winter, amid much competition – and deserving, before its slide into general obscurity, of further ignominy – was Katha Pollit’s consideration of patriotism in Dissent’s winter issue symposium on Intellectuals and Their America. The appellation intellectual was loosely applied, as you can see, and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel (this The Nation of The Nation Institute, underwriter of the anti-Semitic Mondoweiss blog) modestly declined it in her own entry – a modesty that her colleague Pollit, like other virtues, lacks.

Pollit made an earlier inglorious foray into patriotic considerations in the days after 9/11, in the pages of The Nation, the very kind of response, back then, that led Dissent editor Michael Waltzer to pen an essay titled Can There Be a Decent Left, offering up a term Pollit, sensitive on the issue, cites resentfully in 2010. What did Pollit write about after 9/11? She reported on her refusal to let her daughter hang an American flag from their living room window as a sign of American solidarity in the days following the attack. Pollit explained her adamancy to her daughter by asserting, “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

Recall that Pollit, so we are told, is an intellectual (and a poet too, I would remind) when considering her reduction of the American flag, as a symbol, to so limited and negative a signified, in an act of willful ignorance and distortion. Pray she does not decline in intellect.

The American flag, like almost any national flag, first signifies the ideals and formative mythos of the culture adopting it. That the national ideal has inevitably faced degrading confrontations in reality with the limitations of human beings to live up to it has been true for every nation. Exceptions are those flags, such as the Nazi or Confederate flags, that represented debased ideas in their origin. Certainly, history adds to the symbolic weight of any flag, and a penumbra of symbolic meanings, varyingly public and private, ensue. But Pollit’s attempt to deny the American flag any other associations but her own scornful ones – including the original and, for many, the sustaining ideal – is as intellectually flawed and morally dishonest, in the reverse, as attempts by recalcitrant or revivalist Southern boobs to argue that the Stars and Bars did not, in part, originally, and thus unavoidably, stand for white supremacy and slavery. For the flag of the Confederacy, the weight of its historically degraded signification is too great for it to be persuasively used to mean anything else. Claim that the U.S. flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war” and through the weight of a similar degradation, one denies that flag, too, any other sustainable meaning.

Pollit ended her piece with the apparent largeness of sensibility to pronounce, “The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that’s wanted now.” It is the embedded either/or in the statement that is the flaw in this thought, but credit Pollit her hobgoblin, she is grinding the same ax nine years later, no less obtuse, no more attuned to human nature than before.

This time around, though, she sees she went too far in 2001.

My Nation column after 9/11 about not flying the flag was widely attacked as anti-American, cold-hearted, foolish, and ill-advised.

I’m sure I could have written more carefully and sensitively. The tone of that column was unnecessarily prickly, and I went too far when I identified the flag with racism and jingoism, because of course it has many meanings, including anti-racism and rejection of ignorant chauvinism. But my central point was, I believe, a good one: we need to think in a larger framework than our own country and be wary of appeals to patriotism in a crisis, because when the flags come out, people tend to turn off their brains, and the next thing you know, we’re at war. In fact, that is what happened. That is what is still happening.

In the empty chamber of Pollit-thought, even when she tries to reenter the atmosphere she is sucked back into a vacuum. The war to which she refers is not just Iraq, but Afghanistan, the latter of which, too she opposed from the start. It never occurs to her, though, that “appeals to patriotism in a crisis” – or the natural upswell of patriotism, without appeal – might follow the attack on Pearl Harbor or the secession of slave states or a natural disaster, and that patriotism is one variation on the natural affinities that arise among people in various forms of proximity to one another.

Instead, Pollit wonders

What if we took seriously the idea of one world?

Well, what if we did? Many of us do.

Still, when I took up bicycle riding along the coastal path here in Los Angeles (soon after 9/11, as the facts will have it, as my own form of therapy), I soon discovered that an occasional cyclist riding in the opposite direction would raise a hand in passing as a gesture of – what? Hello? Well, yes, I suppose, most immediately. But no jogger ever lifts his hand, or any roller blader, or the constitutional walkers. Only other cyclists. Of course, I respond. We have nothing against those fitness devotees of other stripes, but only we know the swift pleasure of the pedal and the wheel, and we signal that bond with a gesture. During our year on the road in 2009, all over America, I discovered the same to be true among motorcyclists – just a raise of the palm above the left handle bar, in passing the other way, in recognition of our moto-fraternity.

It is so small, but the impulse to seek close fields of association and affective concern is as natural to us as the need to feel at all. That this impulse can be corrupted – by warring motorcycle gangs or territorial surfers, chauvinists and demagogues – signals only our human freedom to ennoble or debase all that we experience and enact.

A motivating concern should be with how to extend our moral interest beyond the naturally narrow range of our affective associations. This is the concern – the one that motivates everyone who cares about broadening human relations beyond nationalism, cultural conflict, and cutthroat economic competition. However, an expansion of our emotional and moral range need not be an antithetical rejection of the foundations of feeling. Our most fundamental insights into our psychological and spiritual natures should make it very nearly self-evident, as I wrote in Principia Liberalis, that one must love one’s neighbor before one can love the world. Accordingly, a popular slogan within the activist left for many years has urged the committed to “Think Globally, Act Locally.” Sage and practical advice that draws on a keen perception: it is easier to act and succeed locally, not just because of the scales of economy and political reach, but because of the natural, urgent range of our affective interests. If this is something to be ashamed of, it is a shame that Americans can share with the rest of the world, because it was not just the U.S. that failed to intervene in Rwanda, or Sudan, or Congo.

The alternative on the left to caring first for those around you – to seeking one neighborhood and one nation first – has too often resulted in a coldly abstracted compassion: a wire-rimmed and bespectacled journey from the Finland Station or a professorial passage from the classroom to the equatorial mountains in the belief that what love requires to save its object is the refining fire of terror. In this way it becomes possible for some on the left to quickly don their glasses and reason in the jungle, as did some like Pollit (absent the most fundamental neighborly solidarity) that while the loss of life might be awful and regrettable, there is an idea to be served, and not one’s neighbor – call it, maybe, now, one world.

In the end, then, the angle of Pollit’s obtuseness is always reliably right in its wrongness, as she concludes

I realize that criticizing patriotism generally doesn’t go over very well, let alone telling people they’re not so great and even a bit greedy. But what has all our flag-waving done for us in the end?

In these comments Pollit actually finds some solidarity, with Slavoj Zizek, who wrote, in the days after 9/11, in the loathsome “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”

we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one’s life[.]

The blaring irony, of course, is that it is the likes of the ideologically refined Zizek and Pollit who cannot emotionally fathom anymore the basic, which is not to say base, human emotions that might commit a life in a deeply felt wave of a flag and the good some believe the flag represents. For in Pollit’s wonder what flag-waving has done for us, she presumably has no care what result was delivered by the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or the Second World War, or might come in the contest between Islamic fundamentalism and the best of the West. She has no memory of the many hundreds of thousands who died over more than two centuries that she might live, in such safety, to be so stupid.

Patriotism – an idea so compelling that the dogs of war, come from every direction, are drawn, each in their different way, to piss on it.

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 1:44 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Some times real life intervenes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 12:35 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

The Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced The Pacific is an estimable effort, but has failed, unlike its predecessor, Band of Brothers – about the war in Europe – to produce a cohesive, overarching narrative and vision of the Pacific war. BOB, based on Steven Ambrose’s book about the real life Easy Company, began with a cohesive whole. The Pacific, woven together from the memoirs of several men, and scattered in its attention over several distinct island campaigns, has struggled to produce the same sense of continuity. Last night, however, it reached a height. Episode seven, the second full episode to concentrate on the infernal combat on Pelieu, explored a level of spiritual bleakness amid the carnage of war that shifted The Pacific from the patriotic realism of Spielberg’s and Hank’s Saving Private Ryan to the soulless hell of sustained combat depicted in Terence Malick’s less hallowed The Thin Red Line. I explored this comparison in “The Altered State of War,” at Bright Lights Film Journal, if you have any interest in war films and how they function.

One of the ways depictions of war function is in their varied willingness to redeem the psychic horror and physical damage of war in patriotic honor. Disputes over war art, and war, often center on this issue. In these disputes the moral and esthetic often mix in complex ways. For instance, war films that are too overtly patriotic – even to the point of the jingoistic – will be criticized esthetically, as will almost any artistic statement that seems obvious and heavy handed. For some, though, this esthetic criticism is also a moral critique, as what are considered excessive displays of patriotism, in general, outside of art, are thought morally dubious, manipulative, dangerous.

While some conservatives find class snobbery in the liberal contempt for Sarah Palin, and I’ve said before that I think there is undeniable truth in the claim, easily confused with class snobbery is this hybrid of aesthetic and moral response. To reduce liberal response to Glenn Beck, to choose another example, to this kind of condescension would be an error. Unlike Palin, who proudly promotes a class and cultural identity to which highly educated liberals might negatively respond, Beck does not project his personal identity in this manner. What he shares with Palin, aside from specific views on policy, is a patriotic promotionalism that many liberals find profoundly, vomitably cheesy. The fearful, weepy patriotic displays are so crassly manipulative, so transparently demagogic, as a matter of style, that they lose any value as expression, regardless of the idea they express. But the matter of style is not one of mere style, the fey response of aesthetes. The idea of patriotism embraces complexly interacting sets of relations among people – consider, for instance, the deep discord between many liberals and conservatives today that renders their affinity as Americans quite an abstracted one – that are fundamentally moral in the consideration. A simplistic or manipulated expression of patriotism is not simply an aesthetic failure, but a moral offense – a deficiency in that it simplifies complex moral ideas. The response to Palin, like that to Beck – who is clearly smarter (both more knowledgeable and more intelligent) than Palin – draws on this interaction of the aesthetic and the moral.

We can find this interaction in Palin’s new Fox News program. We can find it in its title: Real American Stories. Well, we know it can and will be Real (American Stories), but we also know, liberal and conservative alike, that the title is meant to convey a notion of Real American (Stories). This is a tiring, but not tired, conservative move, because it is long-established and continuing, and liberals have never found an effective response to it. Liberal expressions of and about patriotism are almost entirely defensive responses to conservative professions of it, and complex, defensive responses are almost always inferior to the simplistic expression of the supposedly simple virtue that prompted them, especially in politics: We’re talking about patriotism – what’s complicated?

We saw this during the 2008 presidential campaign in the minor, but not insignificant controversy over Barack Obama’s American flag label pin – or lack thereof. One would imagine that the individualistic strain of American conservatism would abhor the enforced pieties of culturally conformist displays, but twentieth century conservatism is actually steeped in them. And because this is politics, one can’t win on the topic. You object to wearing a flag pin on your lapel – what kind of American are you?

No, you see, it’s not the flag, it’s the – . Yeah, yeah.

So Obama wears the pin, and his opponents – many of them – don’t think he is American anyway, and the next person who will sell U.S. secrets to a foreign power for fifty thousand dollars and a new home for his wife wore one on his way into Langley this morning.

Patriotism – it’s simple. Or not, less so when conservatives and liberals are so much positioning themselves on it in reaction to the other.

Take Susannah at The Minority Report who puts together an undeniably effective post demonstrating that most of the dissenting verbal excesses of which liberals now think conservatives guilty have been committed by liberals, and are thus okay. One wonders whether this was Susannah’s position when liberals were committing these excesses in large numbers against George W. Bush, or whether she is a convert to this okayness only now that it is her turn. One does have to wonder, too, when adults will stop arguing like seven year olds, and cease crying “You did it, too!” and expecting to be taken seriously by anyone other than knee-jerk allies.

However, Susannah is not content to ratify any form of dissent, no matter how distasteful, as okay; she actually titles her post “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism.”

Or that’s what the left used to say when George W. Bush was president. And, you know what? They were right. Dissent is still the highest form of patriotism.

Ah, nothing like the passion of the convert.

But forgive me if I – dissent. The night before last I reviewed Warren Beatty’s Reds for the first time in nearly thirty years. In a late scene, Beatty’s John Reed discovers that Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev has been altering Reed’s speeches in translation. Zinoviev, who was no slouch at dissent himself (for which Stalin had him pay in 1936), tells Reed to get with the program, and Reed fires back that dissent is the essence of revolution.

And of patriotism? Hmm. Where are we headed with this?

This is an example of how thinking is distorted when it is guided by the desire to score political points against the opponent, by turning the opponent’s own moves and language against him.

Dissent is a value to be very highly esteemed, to be sure, but I think the highest form of patriotism is to give one’s life for one’s country, obviously in war, like the men whose stories are told in The Pacific, but in public service too.

Hey, that was a real switcheroo. Gotta work on the cheese, but – how patriotic, how American am I?

AJA

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 12:43 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Culture Clash, The Political Animal.

The Economist – The limits of freedom and faith

From the UN Human Rights Council, another battle in the war of ideas, the weapon is words, demonstrating why we need to be clear about the nature of liberalism and liberty, including the distinction between religious liberty and religious imposition:

For secularists (in the broad sense of people, including believers, who oppose the idea of faith having privileged access to power), all this is alarming. Non-binding resolutions against defamation are bad enough; a UN treaty on race-plus-religion would have legal force, at least for its signatories, and give heart to theocrats.

Mediaite - Rachel Maddow Compares ‘Bogus’ ACORN Scandal To ‘Made-Up’ Climategate

Another expose of conservative exposes. The California attorney general finds

the evidence illustrates, that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor….

Said Rachel Maddow on Friday: The whole premise of the attack on the ACORN offices was false. This guy dressed up as a pimp, went into the offices and they gave him straight up advice as if that was normal. Actually, no, he was dressed up like a law student and they called the cops on him.”

Maddow goes on the compare the “bogus” ACORN scandal to Climategate, “that made-up controversy promoted by climate change deniers and promoted on Fox News Chanel” which was also disproved this week. Which did you hear more about, Maddow wants to know, the scandals or the conclusion they were fake?

More from Maddow, via Mediaite, on the scandal of the ACORN scandal here. Of “Climategate,” I wrote here.

The Christian Science Monitor – The solution for Israelis and Palestinians: a parallel state structure

Mathias Mossberg and Mark LeVine demonstrating why Swedish diplomats and scholar-musician authors of Heavy Metal Islam are probably best confined to their, ahem, proper spheres; or, so detached from reality, they’re reaching for oxygen; or, (my favorite) so theoretical, it’s incredible.

As the two-state solution seems increasingly implausible, voices for a one-state or binational solution become stronger. But a one-state solution is equally unrealistic – the whole raison d’être for the state of Israel is to provide a Jewish state for the Jews. And there are no signs or prospects of change in this basic Israeli position as long as it holds most of the cards….

The most important innovation of a parallel state structure is that state sovereignty would be linked primarily with the individual citizen, and only in a secondary way with territory. Separating the territorial and citizenship/identity dimensions of sovereignty would allow Israelis and Palestinians to retain their national symbols, have political and legislative bodies that are responsible to their own electorate, and retain a high degree of political independence.

Precisely by no longer defining sovereignty through exclusive control over territory, this structure would enable the creation of an independent Palestinian state while preserving the state of Israel, both Jewish and democratic. The contours of political authority and security would be shared by the two states in a manner that guarantees the long-term secure existence of each community. It would be guaranteed by international treaty and, if necessary, a strong international monitoring presence. [Emphasis added]

Yeah, imagine U.N. troops (well, just imagine U.N. troops) keeping people apart neighborhood by neighborhood, even block by block. Imagine, even – I hate to be negative – the nature of warfare, internal and external. Still, this innovative proposal does point the way toward the resolution of personal identity “issues”: two minds, one body.

The Middle East: the undiscovered Utopia.

And continuing to draw from the You Were Always on My Mind (Games) Annals

Mind Game 1

Ynet News publishes what turns out to be an uncorroborated report that

Former IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who is considering contending in Egypt‘s presidential elections next year, expressed his support for the “Palestinian resistance” while slamming Israel.

In a report published Tuesday, the experienced diplomat said that Palestinian violence was the only path open to the Palestinian people, because “the Israeli occupation only understands the language of violence.”

Elder of Ziyon, however, discovers ElBaradei interview appears to have been faked

As Elder states

If the story was true, it would be a bombshell – a Nobel Peace Prize winner saying that he supports terrorism, and someone who wants to be the Prime Minister of Egypt suggesting that Egypt’s sovereignty be compromised by opening the border with Gaza?

Ali ElBaradei, brother of Mohammed, denies that the reported interview ever, in fact, took place. So where did the report originate? As far as Elder can discover

the first place that this story was published was in the Al Qassam Brigades (Hamas) website, although it might have been first published by Iran’s PressTV, whose story is identical to Al Qassam’s.

Mind Game II

Elder, again on the case looks into the wildfire spread of reports of more supposed Israeli crimes and reveals the truth: Israel is NOT deporting tens of thousands of PalArabs

Paraphrased from an Israeli Defense Forces official:

7. Since the beginning of 2010, there have only been 5 Gazans who have been repatriated to Gaza.

8. The current system allows Israeli authorities to arrest, detain and deport illegal residents (specifically those who came in on a tourist visa and decided to stay) – these are the same powers that every sovereign nation in the world possess. The establishment of the Judicial Committee to oversee the process is the only change.

However, as is always so with Pallywood style propaganda, the lie travels farther than the truth. Writes Elder

One cannot understate how much this story has already permeated the Arab world. For example, a group in Tunisia just demanded that no one with Israeli citizenship be allowed to come to Djerba on Lag B’Omer to visit the site of a 1900-year old synagogue and a 1500-year old Torah. The reason is to “protest at Israel’s decision to deport thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank,” which the article helpfully tells us began yesterday.

AJA

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 10:18 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

Video:  TitoAC
Music: Explosions in the Sky – “Your Hand in Mine”

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 4:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

The other day ShrinkWrapped mused a bit about the nature and effect of our human biases in the political sphere, and offered, among other thoughts, that his desire to check them in himself is a reason that he engages with me in our Open Mind series. He also thinks that the challenges of strong argument from the Left help him sharpen his own, contrary thinking. I think very much the same, though I think a bit differently on the matter of bias. It may be Shrink’s psychiatric profession that leads him to think about “bias,” or it may be, rather, Shrink’s own nature – which perhaps led him to pursue psychiatry as a field in the first place – that leads him to think in such terms, and just the consideration of those alternatives is all very much a part of the consideration of “bias.” Bias is hardly a very specialized term, but nonetheless it may be Shrink’s inclination to think along those lines that leads him, perhaps, to be more beneficially attentive than are others to the influence of bias on his own and others’ thinking.

Of course, we all do have biases, but it is a commonplace to resort to the notion of bias as explanation, excuse, or rationale, and the convenience of psychological argumentation is that – particularly for nonprofessionals in non-clinical settings – it can neither be established nor refuted. Once arguments based on remote or generalized psychological “insight” are offered, and especially when they approach the status of cant, ill-considered truism – claims such as “we’re all prejudiced” – I run from them. They may be presented with varying degrees of supposed inductive probability, but they cannot be proven in the individual instance, and they make easy substitutes for the application of reason and evidence to specific terms and situations. Frequently, they are not the end of thought, but the end of thinking. They become, in truth, their own kind of bias.

But what is bias? The word is commonly used interchangeably with prejudice. They are both value-laden words, but what is a primary meaning for the latter is an acquired, secondary meaning for the former. A prejudice is prejudgment founded in the poor logic of hasty and sweeping generalization, usually charged with emotion; consequently, several generations of the culturally and racially sensitive have been instructed, in the language of some didactic mental nanny: “Don’t generalize.” The truth, or course, is that we can’t think, can’t reason, without generalizing. It is a question of how well we do it, how perceptively and methodically.

A bias can be a prejudice, and that is the way we commonly use the word. But in its first sense it is an oblique line, a bent or tendency. Is such necessarily bad? I had a bent toward literature and philosophy. Shrink had a bent toward psychology and medicine. We both have a bent toward politics and policy, which, for some other people, are boring. These are not prejudices, in the common sense, but ways of being in the world, of perceiving the world. We could call them, in each of us, a disposition: a prevailing tendency, mood, or inclination, a temperamental makeup. Dispositions may arise in us naturally. They may also be the product of experience and thought, and of those two interacting with our natures. Again, a disposition is not necessarily a bad thing. Writes Shrink

We all view the world through the filter of our own perceptions and preconceived notions of how the world works.  If we were required to re-construct the world anew every day it would be impossible to function.  Instead we all have a particular weltanschauung into which we incorporate new data.

I agree, though it is worth pausing over the word “preconceived.” Something preconceived tends to be rigid, an idea formed in advance (the “pre”) with inadequate basis, and tending toward a prejudice. However, unless it is a new idea, every conception we bring to bear on our thinking is, literally, a pre-conception, so the word “preconceived” has a value-laden meaning that does not arise precisely out of its valueless constituents. The same is not true of the pre in prejudice. We never want to judge ahead of the facts. Generally speaking, it is a good thing to bring some already formed conceptions to thinking about a problem, though we are always seeking to develop new ones.

How about, then, disposition and – predisposition? To be predisposed is to be disposed, as the pre tells us, in advance, to be inclined, in the manner of a bias. But all dispositions are in advance. A disposition is brought to circumstance; it does not arise out of it. So these definitional distinctions are not exactly exact. (And this is pretty much the reason why a twenty-five hundred year effort to discern and represent a total philosophic system in language came to an end in the twentieth century.) Speaking practically, however, a predisposition is a prejudice. A disposition, I’ll say, is one sense of the word bias – the manner in which each of us looks at the world, which is not necessarily preconceived, predisposed, or prejudiced in the negative senses those words carry, but may be pre-conceived in the way that most of our conceptions properly should be when we bring them to bear on the world. As Shrink said, “If we were required to re-construct the world anew every day it would be impossible to function.”

Yet if we are critical thinkers, we always want to be reviewing our existing conceptions to ensure that they don’t devolve into what we call preconceptions, that our dispositions don’t reduce to predispositions.

How might I apply all this, momentarily, to matters practical and political? Liberalism and conservatism, speaking very generally, are – in thoughtful people, in the best senses – dispositions, biases. They are, to use Shrink’s word, a weltanschauung. This is not a bad thing to be checked, but, like all of our thinking, something to be regularly reviewed. So, briefly, Shrink says,

Thus, a Liberal will have an a priori implicit assumption that weapons are the cause of violence and will therefore support disarmament in its many forms, from nuclear disarmament to gun control laws.  A Conservative will start from the assumption that it is people who are responsible for violence and oppose such disarmament efforts believing that such only empowers the “bad guys.”  Missed by both sides is that the presence of certain weapons decreases the risk of strategic violence while it increases the lethality of impulsive violence and may make such violence more likely.

I don’t doubt that there are liberals who believe what Shrink says. There certainly are liberals who talk that way. I’m not sure what percentage one could say actually believe that “weapons are the cause of violence.” But I do not believe that for any who do it is an “a priori implicit assumption.” That casts the liberals who may hold strong anti-gun ownership views as unthinking rather than, perhaps, mistaken in their thinking. I am a liberal, and I do not believe weapons cause violence; however, they do enable violence and can increase its lethality. There is a reason we do not send armies into the field with the bayonet only and not the automatic rifle. Nonetheless, given the historic culture of the United States and present conditions (so many guns already, and no one about to collect them), I support gun ownership rights. I have owned guns myself, precisely for the purpose of self-defense. (I would think differently were I a citizen of various other nations such as England or Japan, which are evidence against many arguments for gun ownership). I also conclude, despite what some people wish to believe, that the Second Amendment to the Constitution authorizes gun ownership. However, this does not militate against stringent regulation of the kinds of guns people may own or against commonsense regulation of who may own them, under what circumstances, and how they are sold. The question is whether we are considering an idea or pushing an ideology – for me, a difference between a disposition and predisposition.

Shrink says also

As much as I find the guiding philosophy of the ACLU to be, in practice, repugnant and dangerous, I also recognize that they force the Right, when in power, to be attentive to actions that could threaten our freedoms.

This is a curiously contradictory statement. The first half I think typically expressive of the conservative view – and that is maybe my version of what I think is Shrink’s stereotype of liberal views about guns. I don’t think so, but maybe. I do not always agree with the ACLU, but I am a card-carrying member precisely for the reason Shrink expresses in the second half of the sentence. If the ACLU is doing its job, it is always going to be challenging someone’s rationalizations for the infringement of liberties. Aside from the fact that ACLU rhetoric is partisan – a historic error, in my judgment, that enabled conservatives to demonize it – the ACLU, rather than being repugnant in practice, has been extraordinarily principled. From the famous Skokie case of the 1970’s, when the ACLU defended the right of the American Nazi party to stage a public march, a position that lost the ACLU up to 25% of its membership, to its longstanding opposition to campaign finance restriction, on the same free speech grounds as conservatives, which even saw the ACLU filing a brief for the winning side in the recent Citizens United case, the ACLU has been true to its conception of civil liberties even when it has brought the organization into conflict with its primary supportive constituency.

What alienates the Right from the ACLU, aside from anger about particular cases – as the Left, in general, (and I, in the latter case) opposed the ACLU’s position in the instances cited above – are differing dispositions toward civil liberties. One disposition leans more toward various emanations from property rights, the other toward behavioral freedoms and what became known as civil rights. The open question, like the Open Mind, is whether any of our differing dispositions, our conscious and considered biases, can anymore be accepted by some as political inclination and not subterranean malevolence.

Writes Shrink

Unfortunately, we do not have anything truly analogous on the Right [to the ACLU] to assist the Left in a similar fashion [by challenging it].… Perhaps because they have not had such opponents, the Left has fallen short in their ability to defend many of their positions when challenged.

Shockingly, I view the matter very much to the contrary.

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 4:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

The New York Times reports on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to introduce

a bill in May to ban the wearing of the full veil in public places in France

including

from streets, markets and shops, according to his spokesman, Luc Chatel.

Sarkozy intends the bill, a follow up to the 2004 ban on conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools, to supersede

An earlier proposal from a panel of the National Assembly [that] suggested a bill banning the full veil in public places belonging to the state, like schools and public buildings, and in areas where facial recognition is vital for security reasons: airports, banks and even public transport.

As I have suggested, here, here and here, I think the National Assembly has offered a reasoned, sensible approach. Sarkozy overreaches, beyond what can be justified in a liberal society, and the error could have long-term negative consequences. Sarkozy has already been warned by France’s Council of State, the chief administrative authority in France, that such a total ban would have no legal basis.

The Times also reports that Belgium too is planning to vote on a bill that mandates a fine and brief jail term for anyone wearing the full veil without police permission.

The danger is this. Many European nations are facing the threat of a significant and growing immigrant population not only resistant to assimilation, but hostile to the values of the cultures they have entered. On one hand are politically correct, even sometimes themselves illiberal social elements ideologically committed to denying the nature of the problem. On the other are predictable xenophobic and racialist forces driven to excessive reaction. The best and surest way to meet the challenge is by upholding liberal values, clearly understood, that in themselves properly contain the illiberal values and practices of unsympathetic immigrant Muslim populations. The National Assembly’s proposal does this. If Sarkozy’s overreach is struck down by French courts, the product of his effort, rather than a discrete effective measure in a broader, successful policy, may be the impression of France’s own illiberalism and an intellectually floundering response.

In opposing illiberalism, liberalism needs to perceive clearly what it, itself, is.

AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 4:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Culture Clash, The Political Animal.

Officially titled the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the conference, running from April 19 though tomorrow is being hosted by President Evo Morales of Bolivia, which has the only majority indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere, at approximately 55%. The following press release from the Indigenous Environmental Network was distributed through NativeWeb.

April 20, 2010.

News Release from Indigenous Environmental Network

Cochabamba, Bolivia — Indigenous Peoples from across North America and their allies from around the world gathered at the invitation of Bolivian President Evo Morales in Cochabamba this morning for the kick-off of an historic conference on climate change and the “rights of Mother Earth.” Morales called this conference in the wake of failed climate talks in Copenhagen last year.

Over 15,000 delegates from 126 countries heard President Morales speak at the soccer stadium in the village of Tiquipaya today, and are meeting in working group sessions this week to develop strategies and make policy proposals on issues such as forests, water, climate debt, and finance, which President Morales pledges to bring to the international negotiations of the COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico later this year.

The convocation this morning included a multi-cultural blessing ceremony by Indigenous Peoples from across the Americas, and speeches by representatives of social movements from five continents on the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold action that protects both human rights and the environment.

“Indigenous rights and knowledge are crucial to addressing climate change, but the United States and Canada have not signed on to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP), and are pushing corporate climate policy agendas that threaten our homelands and livelihoods,” said Jihan Gearon of the Navajo Nation (AZ), Native Energy Organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network.

“We have traveled to Bolivia because President Morales has committed to bring our voices to the global stage at the next round of talks in Cancun.”

“President Morales has asked our recommendations on issues such as REDDs (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation),” said Alberto Saldamando, legal counsel for the International Indian Treaty Council.

“REDD is branded as a friendly forest conservation program, yet it is backed by big polluters. REDD is a dangerous distraction from the root issue of fossil fuel pollution, and could mean disaster for forest-dependent Indigenous Peoples the world over.”

“We are here from the far north to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of the South” said Faith Gemmill, Executive Director of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), who spoke from the stage at the invitation of President Morales.

“We have a choice as human kind – a path of life, or a path of destruction. The people who can change the world are here!”

The Indigenous Environmental Network is in Cochabamba for the duration of the Climate Conference (April 20-24). Onsite cell: +59 740 28531

Indigenous Environmental Network: Indigenous Peoples empowering Indigenous Nations and communities towards sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining the Sacred Fire of our traditions.

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 12:24 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.